dang236 wrote:Well I don't agree that in his second season with the Wizards he was "sub-par" or anything close to awful.
You're empirically wrong.
He averaged a 20-6-4 on 44.5% fg
Some guards that season who scored more than he did and their fg%
Mcgrady 32ppg on 45.7%
Kobe 30ppg on 45.1%
Iverson 27.5ppg on 41.4%
Pierce 26ppg on 41.6%
Ray Allen 22.5ppg on 44%
Allan Houstaon 22.5ppg on 44.5%
Marbury 22ppg on 44%
Stackhouse 21ppg on 41%
Right, right, but a raw FG% analysis is a horrible way to approach this. McGrady managed 56.4% TS, which was almost 4.5% ABOVE league average, while Jordan was about 3% BELOW it.
Kobe managed 55% TS. Iverson managed 50% TS, which was 2% worse than league average and a good indicator of why he's one of the most overrated scorers in league history, but even he was around 1% better than Jordan. Pierce managed 53.2%, more than 1% above average. Ray-Ray was at 56.5%. Houston was at 56.3%. Marbury was at 52% (league average) and Stackhouse was at 52.8%, so above average.
ALL of those guys except for Jordan and AI were at or above league average. Consistently, AI has always been discussed as an inefficient chucker, and Jordan was even worse than Iverson, though at least AI was paying out slightly higher in points per possession. Jordan was absolutely a bad choice as a volume shooter because he wasn't able to hit 3s or draw fouls. One or the other, it would have made sense, but he was playing 60s ball, shooting long 2s (often contested). His FG% was alright, but it was definitively inefficient offense.
Jordan did what he did, and that's fine; as Mark Jackson would say, he's a "grown-ass man." But he also screwed the Washington franchise for two years of really amazing ticket sales, and part of making such decisions is dealing with the criticisms and consequences from the fall-out.
Jordan's return was a dumb move from a basketball perspective; good business, so I get why Washington let it happen, but a really terrible move if you consider the future. I get the need to keep playing, that makes sense. But he did so at the expense of the young talent on the team and made roster moves explicitly based around win-now competition that was never going anywhere. It was stupid and detrimental to the franchise. If he hadn't come back, they might have drafted Amare, Caron Butler or Yao. Maybe Lebron, Wade or Melo. Instead, they got Jarvis Hayes and Jared Jeffries, still missed the playoffs and traded away Rip Hamilton for Jerry Stackhouse, while playing Jahidi White, Charles Oakley and Christian Laettner lots of minutes instead of Haywood and Kwame. That was just (Please Use More Appropriate Word).
